being queer at wiscon

[aamcnamara]

This is unfortunately not an "awesome things I did at WisCon!" post.

On Saturday afternoon, I went to the "Lesbians in SF/F" panel. I learned that basically without even trying very hard I have covered pretty much all of the extant lesbian characters in SF/F proper; and that I have no idea about "lesfic", which apparently grew out of Xena fandom and which I will probably look into now--it sounds like it's mostly erotica/relationship focused, so I'm not certain I'll love it to bits, but it will be interesting at any rate.

But that is not what I wanted to talk about.

See, at one point the panel was talking about who writes lesfic and/or lesbian SF/F characters, and someone brought up a short story published in a lesfic anthology. This story was written by a straight woman, and had two female characters (each grieving for a man she'd lost) having a one-night stand. Not having read the story, I can't say whether it's plausible in the context of those specific characters. But the response surprised me. Someone in the audience said (a paraphrase) "If you want to write bisexual novels, fine, but don't put it in our lesfic anthologies." And everyone seemed to be okay with that statement.

Which... surprised me. To be fair, mostly I hang out with queer people who are about my age. I haven't ever really talked with older queer people about their queerness. And I was aware that discrimination against bisexual people from within the gay community existed, but I don't see that much in people my age.

But when I read the panel title, I parsed "lesbian characters" as "female characters who like and/or like to sleep with other female characters". This doesn't exclude bisexual characters, pansexual characters, asexual characters, non-cisgendered characters... but the panelists and the audience at least in large part seemed to be using the word "lesbian" very specifically.

Even though I probably would've fit into their definitions of "lesbian" and certainly fit the general aesthetic of the room's occupants, I felt uncomfortable at that moment, excluded. Because of how I identify myself (as gay, though that has other factors as well) and because of how I see the queer community. There's a reason that I use that word now and not GLBT; I don't see it as Gay and Lesbian and Bisexual and Transgender, all the little new boxes to fit ourselves into.

(At another point this weekend, someone in a different panel audience was making a comment about queer inclusion and said "G, L, B, T, Q... whatever other letters they've added on now..." and that is another reason, to me, to just have done and call it the queer community. I don't see a need for everyone to memorize long strings of letters so that they know every single possible identification, because that would be impossible. Everyone identifies themselves, and maybe everyone uses a different word for it--the important thing is to understand how to accept and learn about identities you haven't heard of before.)

To add a third reason to my list of why I didn't like that realization: if we're talking specifically about this group that the room was calling "lesbian", that doesn't leave much room for the "speculative" bit of speculative fiction. You can do "lesbians with werewolves", you can do "lesbians with vampires", but you can't have works that transform our understanding of sexual orientation as it exists in our society. Because that's not this group we call "lesbian" any more; it's something else.

Again, to be fair, I did go to this panel for "female characters who like other female characters" recommendations, and (as we know) gender and sex are largely socially constructed as well. As a cisgendered and cissexual female, that isn't always in my consciousness--I have the privilege of being able to ignore that aspect of it.

So maybe I shouldn't be complaining because I went to see a specific panel topic and it turned out slightly more specifically focused than I wanted it to be. But a) I would have been okay with raising works that deconstructed gender and sex, as well; and b) if nothing else, it was a good reminder of why I call it the queer community, why I identify as gay (which is another post, really), and--most of all--that different generations and groups have different constructions of sexual orientation.

At the panel, I didn't feel that the atmosphere was such that I could have said something about this, but I think it would be fascinating to start this cross-generational, cross-group dialogue. About sexual orientation, about queerness, about the construction of sex and gender in society. As a feminist convention, it almost seems necessary. We say we're feminist, and some of us say we're queer, but the context of those words changes with who's saying them, their history, how they identify themselves. And part of the beauty of it is that we do have this diversity of identification, but I think it would be even more beautiful if we all talked about it to each other.


tl;dr: Hi. I'm Alena. I'm gay. I'm going to go suggest a panel topic for next WisCon now.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Interesting thoughts.

I am still having trouble understanding what 'cis' means as a prefix--how it changes the noun it's attached to.

[shenth.livejournal.com]

It's one thing to want your lesbian anthology to be exclusively about women with women, but that's hard to separate from the biphobia in the queer community. Bisexual people are consistently dismissed and demeaned. I hope your panel helps to reduce that prejudice. :)

[kehrli.livejournal.com]

It is awfully hard for the cisgendered gays and lesbians to deal with all the extra letters this anonymous "they" keeps adding, after all.

I'm so utterly tired of people sticking GLBT on groups/things/etc and pretending it's just GL.

(And yes, I just call it queer, too, because I feel like GLBT excludes people who are queer and do not feel they fit those categories.)

[aliseadae]

Thank you for this post.

I think it might be that certain generations have specific ways of thinking. I think that it is likely to not be a specifically generational thing, but related to a mindset which may be more present in certain generations.

I agree with saying queer to describe one group rather than a long list of separated abbreviations.

I agree with you that this dialog is important and necessary.

[willowfagan.livejournal.com]

Which... surprised me. To be fair, mostly I hang out with queer people who are about my age. I haven't ever really talked with older queer people about their queerness. And I was aware that discrimination against bisexual people from within the gay community existed, but I don't see that much in people my age.

I think I'm significantly older than you (I just turned 28). But I feel pretty much the same way, that the queer people I know are pretty much comfortable with bisexuality. But I used to go to a queer youth group, I think for people 13-17, in the late 90s and I heard that the week the discussion topic was bisexuality (which happened a few months before I started going) things got so heated that some people had to be asked to leave.

I think there's a lot of need for more queer intergenerational dialogue. But it's hard. Once I was in e-mail contact with an older lesbian who told me that "queer" was offensive to her. I didn't know how to respond. Normally, I think that people should get to define for themselves what is offensive, but "queer" is my identity--not gay, or bi, but queer. It's not something that I can really hide for the sake of politeness.

I also like queer as a shorthand for LBGTQ+.

I wasn't able to make it to Wiscon this year, but I looked at the programming and I was surprised to see that there wasn't as much queer content as I would have expected. Did you find that to be true for you? I'm glad that you're proposing a queer panel topic.

[actourdreams.livejournal.com]

I had never heard the term "lesfic," though I had heard "saffic" in a similar context – for femslash, and generally for older fandoms. I think both of these may have gone by the wayside.

And, queer, as much as I identify with and always will align myself with the self-identified queer community, is a generational thing. I know people – gay men my parents' age, my parents' friends – who would be enormously uncomfortable, if not offended, to hear the word queer applied to them, even in a positive, communal context. Some time ago I read a book where the author recounted being approached after a reading/talk by a very irate man who demanded she not use that word anymore, saying, "That's what they call us when they're beating us to death." I think it's both a generational divide in that the older people may not be as familiar with the concept of reclamation, but also that for us younger people, hearing that as a pejorative has not been as universal an experience as it was for them.

That said, the person who said "LGBTQ, whatever else they're adding on" really bothered me. Way to trivialize a whole bunch of people there, man!

[hildebabble.livejournal.com]

It's pretty fascinating, the taxonomy of identifiers within the queer community. But it's also HUGE. I have a friend who explores the "femme"/"butch" dynamic in her theater troupe but also socially, and I couldn't list even half the terms she's told me about. She used to get anti-bisexual flak from the gay community, too, when we were in college together.

I'm not one for labels, personally. They resonate with exclusivity ("I'm this and you're that."). I just use "gay" for everything.

"Cisgendered" is a term I only recently learned, in the past couple months. Has it been around longer than that? I'm unhip.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

I was just generally roaming around looking for WisCon posts and found this, hope it's cool for me to comment-drop. I wasn't at that panel, but that comment would have disturbed me, too. If it was that there were sexual/romantic scenes with f/m as well as f/f then it's a fair point, but if it was just that it was f/f between women who were not exclusively gay, then what could the problem be? Maybe as a bi/pansexual person I'm just not seeing it.

Love to see your panel suggestion! :)

[mlt23.livejournal.com]

I would go to a panel about that. I'm trying to think back to when I learned words like queer and gay and bisexual to remember if the connotation was more negative or positive for them. I want to say that I hadn't really even heard of bi until maybe high school, or I would have realized that I was bi before.